On the existence of sonority-driven stress in Gujarati

Abstract

This paper presents evidence against the existence of sonority-driven stress in Gujarati. Gujarati is one of the clearest and most revealing cases of sonority-driven stress with distinctions among peripheral vowels. A production experiment was performed to determine the accuracy of the claim that [a] attracts stress away from the default position. Of the five types of phonetic evidence examined, only F1 provides clear evidence for stress, revealing stress to be consistently penultimate, and not sonority-driven. As Gujarati is one of the core cases of sonority-driven stress, this finding challenges the claim that it exists. However, this paper does not exclude the possibility that stress may avoid schwa (or central vowels), as reported for several languages. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed, particularly for theories that have a ‘symmetric effect’ and for descriptions that are impressionistic.

Positional vs. sonority-driven stress in Gujarati: New experimental evidence

“…Later work is less equivocal, as Pandit (1958: 216), and Patel & Mody (1960: 24) state that stress is word initial. More recently, Shih (2018) argues that the penultimate syllable of disyllables (that is, the initial syllable) is regularly stressed.…”

“…The most prominent current claim is that stress is driven by an intricate interaction between syllable position and vowel sonority (de Lacy 2002;, on sonority-driven stress generally, see Kenstowicz 1997;Hargus 2001;Crowhurst & Michael 2005), though no two analyses agree entirely (Firth 1957;Cardona 1965;Adenwala 1965;Mistry 1997;Cardona & Suthar 2003;Doctor 2004;Schiering & van der Hulst 2010;Modi 2013). In contrast, some work claims that Gujarati stress is word initial (Turner 1921;Master 1925;Pandit 1958;Patel & Mody 1960;Shih 2018). This study reports acoustic evidence from two experiments designed to test the initial stress and sonority-driven stress analyses.…”

Positional faithfulness drives laxness alternations in Slovenian

“…We conclude that Slovenian stress makes direct reference to particular vowel qualities. In later work, Shih (2016, 2018) and Shih & de Lacy (2020) make the stronger claim that even sonority cannot influence stress assignment. A similar claim is also made by Rasin (2017).…”

Kevin Ryan, Prosodic weight: Categories and continua (Oxford Studies in Phonology and Phonetics). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 288.

“…Goedemans & van Zanten 2007, Tabain, Fletcher & Butcher 2014. Similarly, while the book proposes constraints that 'relate sonority directly to … stress' (20), agreeing with de Lacy (2002,2004) and others, it has been demonstrated that many apparent sonority-driven stress cases have highly conflicting descriptions, and those descriptions do not match experimental results (Shih 2016(Shih , 2018aShih & de Lacy 2019).…”